This Sea Lion Can Headbang Better Than You—Watch Her Out-Perform Humans at Keeping a Beat A new study of Ronan, a sea lion famous for her dancing skills, challenges the idea that only vocal learners can match a tempo Ronan the California sea lion sits in front of a pool at UC Santa Cruz’s Long Marine Laboratory. Colleen Reichmuth; NOAA / NMFS 23554 In 2013, a California sea lion named Ronan shot to fame when her trainers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, revealed she could bop her head to the rhythm of a beat—including to music she hadn’t heard before. Now, Ronan is back in the limelight, thanks to a new study published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports, which demonstrates that she can match a tempo better—and more consistently—than humans. She’s particularly talented when it comes to the song “Boogie Wonderland,” as study lead author Peter Cook, a behavioral neuroscientist at New College of Florida and UC Santa Cruz, tells the Associated Press. “She just nails that one,” he says. To test Ronan’s precision, the researchers pitted her against ten UC Santa Cruz undergraduate students in a dance-off. They played different tempos at 112, 120 and 128 beats per minute (bpm). While Ronan had previously practiced bopping at 120 bpm, she had never experienced 112 or 128 bpm. Ronan bopped her head, and the students were asked to move an arm up and down to the beat of a percussive metronome, while the researchers measured their accuracy. At 120 bpm, Ronan hit the beat within an average of 15 milliseconds, and her timing variability from beat to beat was also around 15 milliseconds. This is ultra precise—for comparison, it takes humans 150 milliseconds to blink, per a statement. “Sometimes, she might hit the beat five milliseconds early, sometimes she might hit it ten milliseconds late. But she’s basically hitting the rhythmic bullseye over and over and over again,” Cook explains in the statement. Battle of the Beats: Sensorimotor Synchronization to Rhythm in an Experienced Sea Lion - ESM2 Watch on Needless to say, “there was no human that was better than Ronan on every measure of precision and consistency,” Cook tells the New York Times’ Gennaro Tomma. “And she was better than most humans on all measures, so she really rose to the top.” The researchers emphasize that Ronan willingly participates in the head bopping—meaning she is not punished for not engaging, should she choose not to. She did undergo some beat-keeping training, but the team says it wasn’t extensive—since 2013, she has participated in about 2,000 training exercises, each lasting just 10 to 15 seconds. Nevertheless, the study reveals that in the 12 years since the last study, Ronan’s beat-keeping ability has improved. While “moving to music probably isn’t that helpful in the wild,” Cook points out, “the ability to perceive a regular pattern in time, the ability to predict the next event in the pattern and the ability to plan and match one’s movement to that event when it happens,” could be, he tells the London Times’ Rhys Blakely. Both studies of Ronan challenge a widely held notion about who, exactly, is capable of maintaining a beat. “Scientists once believed that only animals who were vocal learners—like humans and parrots—could learn to find a beat,” Hugo Merchant, a researcher at Mexico’s Institute of Neurobiology who was not involved in the study, tells the Associated Press. Aniruddh Patel, a psychologist at Tufts University who didn’t participate in the study, hasn’t yet been convinced otherwise, per the New York Times. He says scientists should conduct more research on whether sea lions also have vocal learning abilities. Plus, Ronan was trained to keep a beat, while humans and parrots do it spontaneously—an “important difference,” Patel adds. (He has previously studied a dancing cockatoo named Snowball.) Still, the new findings provide insight on rhythm perception in animals, which is key to understanding the evolution of cognition. Moving forward, the team aims to test other sea lions and see if Ronan can match less predictable tempos. Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.